Constance Petersen: I think the greatest harm done the human race has been done by the poets

Anthony Edwardes: Oh, poets are dull boys, most of them, but not especially fiendish.

Constance Petersen: They keep filling people's heads with delusions about love... writing about it as if it were a symphony orchestra or a flight of angels.

Anthony Edwardes: Which is isn't, eh?

Constance Petersen: Of course not. People fall in love, as they put it, because they respond to a certain hair coloring or vocal tones or mannerisms that remind them of their parents.

Anthony Edwardes: Or... or... sometimes for no reason at all.

Constance Petersen: That's not the point. The point is that people read about love as one thing and experience it as another. Well, they expect kisses to be like lyrical poems and embraces to be like Shakespearean dramas.

Anthony Edwardes: And when they find out differently, then they get sick and have to be analyzed, eh?